crond disabled?

Mikus Grinbergs mikus at bga.com
Wed Nov 4 16:40:03 EST 2009


>> Do we really want to be running something like update which (I assume)
>> takes significant resources without consulting with the user?
> 
> Yes! Remember, these are not designed as normal laptops. They are for
> young children and for use in schools. The only time to do updates is
> when the child is at school, connected to the school server, and if
> updates are not fully automatic then they simply will not happen.

In an endeavor *completely* removed from OLPC (or the XO), I've had 
a long-standing philosophy difference - I'm a "hands on" guy - and 
they don't want to facilitate that.  Now with regard to automatic 
updates, the same philosophy difference is showing up with the XO:

Wiki page http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Update_streams  describes how by 
specifying 'none' as the update-stream value, updates are supposed 
to be "never update me" (automatically).  Yet, despite me always 
having 'none' in /security/update-stream -- in 2007/2008 if I 
entered 'top' I all too frequently saw 'olpc-update-query' using 
system resources (uselessly, because it was unable to get through my 
proxy back to any server).  [I do updating with manual commands.]

Please -- do run your automatic updates to your heart's content. 
But if a non-child XO user like me has specified 'none' -- DON'T run 
automatic updates.


Thanks,  mikus




More information about the Devel mailing list